Colorado Springs Deals With Mass Killing as Nation Moves On

COLORADO SPRINGS — It had been just five days since a visit to a Planned Parenthood clinic put Kentanya Craion in the middle of a massacre that left her cowering in a back room and her boyfriend among the three dead.

And then she watched in horror on her mother’s television as the shooting here was eclipsed by another, deadlier, more spectacular mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. “Disgusting,” Ms. Craion said. “I can’t imagine how the families are feeling.”

She paused and corrected herself: “I know how they’re feeling. I know exactly how they’re feeling.”

This was the distinctly and distressingly American nightmare in which the people of Colorado Springs found themselves this month: grieving, confused and emotionally raw — but with all of those emotions amplified and distorted by a new mass shooting in a country where, by one measure, such attacks occur on average more than once a day.

And the shooting in California, which claimed 14 lives, siphoned much of the national focus from Colorado Springs, replacing a high-intensity conversation about violence against abortion clinics with perhaps an even more intense one about violence committed by Islamic terrorists.

Unlike Mr. Suthers, a first-term mayor who has served as Colorado’s attorney general and as a United States attorney, Jane Delaney seems unsurprised that another mass shooting occurred so soon. Dr. Delaney, 65, a retired physician, was trapped inside the King Soopers grocery store for hours during the melee, in which a self-professed anti-abortion crusader, Robert L. Dear Jr., is accused of attacking the clinic and engaging the police in a tense five-and-a-half-hour standoff before his capture.

Dr. Delaney said that the rampage at the clinic, which also left nine wounded, had itself eclipsed an episode here on Halloween morning when a man named Noah Harpham, 33, fatally shot three people before dying in a gun battle with the police. He left an angry blog post behind.

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Jane Delaney, a retired physician, was trapped in a nearby supermarket when the Planned Parenthood shooting happened.CreditTheo Stroomer for The New York Times

“It seems like it’s happening every day,” she said.

Last week, a disheveled Mr. Dear, 57, appeared for the first time in a crowded downtown courtroom here. He was formally charged with 179 felonies, including counts of first-degree murder. As the victims’ friends and family looked on, Mr. Dear, in manacles and a county jail jumpsuit, blurted out that he was guilty, a “warrior for the babies.”

About five miles north, the Planned Parenthood building, still a crime scene, was empty, its parking lot surrounded by fencing and no-trespassing signs. A police officer kept watch, and a blue tarp covered the entrance. And yet life bustled all around, with patients heading in and out of appointments at a nearby medical building, and Salvation Army volunteers ringing bells for shoppers at the King Soopers, a few yards away, where Dr. Delaney and dozens of others had been trapped less than two weeks before.

Quan Hoang, 25, who had also been trapped on the day of the shootings in his workplace, Fusion Nails, a salon near Planned Parenthood, tried to square the seeming normality the day after the shooting with the routine mayhem everyone sees on their Facebook feed and in the news daily. It was hard to do.

“America’s becoming a crazy place,” he said.

Of course, it was worst, and certainly not back to normal, for those directly affected.

Ms. Craion had visited Planned Parenthood with her boyfriend and learned that she was pregnant before fleeing in terror to a room at the back of the clinic building where a bullet whizzed through the walls as she hid. Her boyfriend, Ke’Arre M. Stewart, was shot to death by the assailant.

Ms. Craion, who spoke briefly with a reporter last week, did not return further phone calls; her story was pieced together from earlier TV interviews and a GoFundMe website set up by her sister soliciting donations for Ms. Craion’s family.

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Robert L. Dear Jr. appeared in court Dec. 9 for a hearing to face 179 counts of various criminal charges in connection with the Colorado Springs shooting.CreditPool photo by Andy Cross

Shortly after the San Bernardino shooting, Matt Niedzielski, the president of Pikes Peak Citizens for Life, an antiabortion group, said that a number of journalists canceled interviews with him. For some, the abrupt shift of the news media spotlight felt like a kind of perverse blessing, relieving some pressure and giving the city space to mourn and unite.

Colorado Springs, set at the base of Pikes Peak, has a reputation as a bastion of conservatism; it is home to many retired military personnel, as well as Focus on the Family, a Christian evangelical group. But it also has a large share of outspoken liberals. Colorado College, a small liberal arts school, is a few blocks from downtown, where on the streets, packs of punks, hippies and drifters lend a bohemian flavor.

When asked if the two tribes live in harmony or discord, many here simply answer yes.

Two days after the San Bernardino shooting, thousands of residents lined the streets here and packed the New Life Church to pay their respects to Garrett Swasey, an officer at the local campus of the University of Colorado whom the authorities said Mr. Dear killed in the standoff.

Westboro Baptist Church, an ultraconservative group known for protesting at military funerals, had threatened to attend, which gave a sense of shared purpose to left and right, said Joy Garscadden, operations manager for Citizens Project, a local nonprofit that supports “equality, religious freedom and respect for diversity.” Ms. Garscadden found herself watching the funeral procession in the presence of other residents who were openly carrying holstered firearms.

John Hazlehurst, 75, a liberal columnist at The Colorado Springs Independent and reporter for a local business journal, said that a number of community and business leaders were probably relieved that the national attention the city received was so slight. The shooting, he said, fit into “a kind of careless narrative of Colorado Springs that’s kind of widespread, that there’s nobody here but crazy right-wing people who are armed and ready to go shoot up a place like Planned Parenthood whenever the spirit moves them,” he said. “And of course, that’s not true.”

Deb Walker, the executive director of Citizens Project, said she understood why some people might have felt relieved when many national news reporters left town. But she also worried that the city of more than 400,000 may have missed a chance to have tough conversations about topics like gun control, abortion clinic safety and women’s access to reproductive health care.

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Police vehicles parked at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, which is still a crime scene.CreditTheo Stroomer for The New York Times

Vicki Saporta, the president and chief executive of the National Abortion Federation, a professional association of abortion providers, said the San Bernardino shooting had “most definitely” derailed the conversation about violence and threats directed at abortion clinics.

That shooting, she said, “eclipsed the media coverage and public concern to a certain degree about what transpired in Colorado Springs, and the attack on abortion providers.”

She added, “I mean, we really can’t normalize these types of attacks.”

Here, as elsewhere, the attack in San Bernardino has changed the nature of the conversation about mass shootings, which now entails questions about homegrown radicalized Muslims and the influence of the Islamic State. Last Wednesday, a few hours before Mr. Dear’s court appearance, Mayor Suthers went to the studios of KVOR, an AM radio station, where he was the guest on a call-in show.

He spoke about how both shootings showed how difficult it was to identify the perpetrators of mass murders before they occurred. He told people to call the police if they suspected their neighbors of acting strangely.

“This is going to be a longstanding battle with Islamic extremism,” he said.

Mr. Suthers, a Republican and Colorado native, has a reputation for being practical, conservative and blunt. He was state attorney general during the 2012 mass shooting at the movie theater in Aurora that killed 12 and injured 70. Like many other Coloradans, he lived through the Columbine massacre. He did not seem particularly shocked when the mayhem commenced here Nov. 27.

In between live segments on the radio show, a reporter asked if he expected such shootings to continue.

“For the foreseeable future, yes,” he said. “I don’t want be overly pessimistic, but I don’t see any reason to believe that this is going to suddenly stop.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Colorado Springs Tries to Recover as Nation Moves On . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe